Longlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize
Evelyn Araluen – The Rot
Poetry · University of Queensland Press
About the Book
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise – this book demands you ready yourself for a better world.
“Evelyn Araluen unleashes this incendiary collection, aimed squarely at the corrosive heart of colonialism, capitalism, misogyny and genocide.”
– 2026 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Evelyn Araluen
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and in the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she is a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, a co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the premier’s awards in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Her work has also received the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Melbourne Prize Career Development Award.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Her headlong language – the ferocity of its anger and sorrow – impels you from one poem to the next. You return again (and again) to reckon with this book’s difficult, seductive beauty, its deadly analyses, its poised wit, its wicked complexities, and its desolations and joys.” – Alison Croggon, The Guardian
“In its downbeat depressive brilliance, The Rot offers an eerie insomniac beauty, attuned precisely to our dark times. No, that’s not quite correct. They are not “our” dark times in this book; they are yours. This is a book for your dark times. And the unanswerable question it poses is whether you – and it – can outlast them.” – The Conversation
Links
Listen to Evelyn discuss The Rot on 3RRR.
Read Evelyn’s interview with Imogen Sabey.
Read Evelyn’s essay on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty in the Sydney Review of Books.
Judges’ Report
A visceral collection of poetry and fragmented prose as shattered and sharp as a shard of glass. Evelyn Araluen unleashes this incendiary collection like a volley of burning arrows aimed squarely at the corrosive heart of colonialism, capitalism, misogyny and genocide. The poems examine rot as both literal process and structural condition, the death of country, death on country, the horrors of Gaza, global violence and the ongoing moral decay of settler colonialism. Structured in three sections, Holdings, Fragments on Rotting and Unfoldings, the collection insists on resistance and justice then imagines a post-colonial world for girls who survive this one. The prose is exquisitely distilled and painfully charged; the regular use of second person unapologetically confrontational. The Rot is an uncompromising demand for girls and women to own their desire and reckon with their rage as a force to power their own liberation. “This was always meant to hurt.”
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